Samuel Beckett’s influence on movies was somewhat oblique, and I think he preferred it that way. The Irish playwright, novelist, and poet, referred to at various times as a modernist, an absurdist, a minimalist, and an existentialist, did, in fact, write one screenplay, the minimally titled, mostly silent Film which provided Buster Keaton one of his final starring roles. (Film, directed by Alan Schneider, is neither great nor terrible. The last shocked close-up of Keaton, contemplating the inescapable fact of his own existence, makes the whole thing worthwhile.)

Regardless, almost of all Beckett’s plays have been filmed at one time or another (PBS featured a series of them directed by Anthony Minghella, Neil Jordan, and David Mamet, among others), and one can see a Beckett-like world view in films as diverse as Roman Polanski’s black comedy Cul-de-Sac and Peter Brook’s King Lear.

Perhaps the most fitting cinematic tribute of all – director David Cronenberg and actor Ralph Fiennes consciously modeled the physical appearance of the schizophrenic protagonist of Spider (2002, above bottom) on the way Samuel Beckett looked and moved.